NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The Yale football and
women’s ice hockey teams were facing a major challenge as
they headed into their second annual “Get in the Game. Save a
Life.” marrow donor testing drive Thursday afternoon at
Commons. The Bulldogs had tested a record 704 people at last
year’s drive -- and since all of those people were now
already in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be the Match
Registry, the two teams would have to find hundreds upon hundreds
of new registrants this year in order to meet their goal of saving
lives and keeping their record intact. The teams came up with a
game plan, starting work on the project weeks in advance. And they
got a reminder of just how important their work was earlier this
week, when women’s ice hockey forward Mandi Schwartz learned
that she would have to return home to Saskatchewan to battle cancer
again. Just hours after Schwartz left New Haven, the Bulldogs
rallied together and shattered their own record by signing up 911
potential donors [note: this figure was adjusted to 921 after
the official count].

“Some people will have their lives saved because of what
Yale did today,” said Chris Mulcahy, the National Marrow
Donor Program representative who worked with the teams to
coordinate the drive.

Those who participated in the drive will have their
tests -- which consisted of four cheek swabs -- entered into the
registry within the next four to six weeks. They will remain there
as options for a life-saving marrow donation until they reach the
age of 61.

Every year, thousands of people of all ages, like Schwartz, are
diagnosed with leukemia and other life-threatening diseases. For
many of them, a bone marrow or cord blood transplant from
a matching donor is the best hope for a cure. Seventy percent
of people do not have a donor in their family and depend
on the Be The Match Registry to find a match to save
their life.

Mulcahy noted that Yale’s drive saw as many new
registrants in one day as he typically sees in three months, and
was twice as big as any other drive he had been a part of. He
travels throughout New England to roughly 150 drives per year.

Mulcahy had a simple explanation for the reason behind
Yale’s success.

“The players,” Mulcahy said. “There is no
doubt about it. To get 200 more people in addition to what they did
last year is so impressive because every one of those people from
last year was already in the registry. The players couldn’t
draw from those same friends, roommates or teammates. They had to
make the effort to find new people. That really speaks to what they
accomplished, basically starting from scratch. The players did a
wonderful job educating the Yale community on the need for
donors.”

Much of the work began a month earlier, when Larry Ciotti -- an
18-year assistant coach with the Yale football team -- began
leading a committee to plan this year’s drive. Ciotti first
brought the idea for the drive to Yale last year after hearing
about it from his friend Andy Talley, the head coach at Villanova.
Talley started the “Get in the Game. Save a Life.”
program with his team in 1992 and it has now grown to include 35
college football teams throughout the country. At Yale,
Schwartz’ condition inspired the women’s hockey team to
participate as well. The program has resulted in more than 11,500
potential donors being tested, including many who have been matches
to make life-saving donations.

The job Yale did last year opened some eyes, and in a
promotional video for “Get in the Game. Save a Life.”
this year Talley made a point of recognizing Yale’s record
– while also noting that he wanted his team to beat that
record. The Wildcats held their drive last week and made a run at
the Bulldogs’ mark but finished just short, with 701 people.
Other top schools this year included Duquesne (428), Penn (410) and
Temple (405, including a match for their football manager with
leukemia). With several other schools still scheduled to hold
drives, the Bulldogs wanted to make sure the record stayed in New
Haven.

“It’s very difficult just to get even 500
people,” Ciotti said. “To finish with more than 900 is
phenomenal -- well beyond my expectations. Everybody involved did a
great job. The kids were great. They believe in the fact that we
can save a life, and they put a lot of passion and energy into
it.”

The importance of the drive was hammered home throughout the
Yale campus in a multitude of ways, including a front-page story in
the Yale Daily News Thursday that detailed both Schwartz’
need for a donor and one of the success stories from last
year’s drive – Jim Owen, a Yale employee who got tested
and eventually made a life-saving donation.

Owen was inspired to come to the drive last year when he read
about Schwartz, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in
December of 2008 at the age of 20. After months of chemotherapy
back home, Schwartz was in remission by last spring. She returned
to Yale in January and was taking classes and practicing with the
hockey team with the goal of returning to the ice in the fall of
2010. Those plans were put on hold earlier this week when test
results indicated that she would need to go through chemotherapy
again. The ultimate goal is to get her back in remission and give
her a transplant, but a perfect “10 out of 10” match
has not been found yet.

On Thursday Schwartz’ No. 17 jersey hung on the
hospitality tent outside Commons, and the members of the
women’s ice hockey team at the drive all wore the Yale Hockey
“No. 17” t-shirts that were initially made as part of a
fundraiser for Schwartz last season. Schwartz was an active member
of the drive committee, helping plan the event for weeks, and her
presence was still felt throughout the day.

“My thoughts were all about Mandi today,” Ciotti
said.

For Schwartz’ teammates, the drive represented a chance to
focus their energy less than 48 hours after receiving the news that
Schwartz would have to head home for chemotherapy. The huge turnout
was a much-needed piece of positive news.

“For our team in particular, it is so exciting to have
this many people register,” said senior forward Berit
Johnson. “With Mandi’s re-diagnosis, which was such a
shock, this was a way for us to do something right away to support
her.”

The day started off emotionally for the team, as the Bulldogs
gathered for breakfast with Schwartz and her mother before saying
goodbye.

“We walked her to the car, then had a team hug to show our
support for her,” Johnson said. “We know she’s
going to make it through this, and we’re going to see her
again soon.”

While many of the people who showed up on Thursday had already
heard about the drive through stories like Schwartz’, the
Bulldogs also worked hard to educate everyone who passed by about
how important taking 15 minutes to get their cheeks swabbed could
be. Working side-by-side with their coaches on Beinecke Plaza just
outside Commons, the Yale football players’ competitive
instincts came in handy as they tried to recruit potential
donors.

“I was challenged,” said senior linebacker Tim
“Bear” Handlon. “Presto [assistant coach Mike
Preston] called me out to see if I could get one.”

Handlon met the challenge -- and he even used some of his
football footwork as he convinced someone walking away from the
drive to turn around and potentially help save a life.

“She went into speed-walking mode, so I turned around and
went into a backpedal,” Handlon said. “That was what
got her. She made it all the way to Wall Street before I convinced
her to turn around. The guys were really cheering when I came back
with her. Maybe she’ll be a match.”

Those same competitive instincts were on display inside Commons
as well, where players, coaches and athletic department
administrators staffed a half-dozen stations to help potential
donors through the various steps in the process. While the football
and women’s ice hockey teams were the leaders, the rest of
Yale’s athletic teams were all well-represented, either as
volunteers or as potential donors. The official count was kept all
day long at Station 5, where players gradually collected the
envelopes with swabs in them and stuffed them into boxes for
delivery to the National Marrow Donor Program. After a slow start
to the drive, which began at 11 a.m., the Bulldogs realized they
were nearing their record of 704 at around 2:30 p.m. Counting each
envelope as it got handed in around that time, two women’s
hockey players vied for the chance to be the one to put away the
record-breaker. In a photo finish, junior forward Bray Ketchum got
in the record-tying 704th, and sophomore forward Lauren
Davis got credit for the record-breaking 705th.

With the record in hand, the Bulldogs still had plenty of work
to do. There were ebbs and flows in the traffic as students came
and went to class early in the day. But with so many players from
both teams spreading out across campus to get the word out, more
and more people began showing up as the day wore on. The line just
to get into Commons eventually grew to nearly 100 people,
stretching out far into Beinecke Plaza.

“The drive was a lot more widely publicized this
year,” Johnson said. “There were so many more e-mails,
and so much more of an effort to make people aware of what was
involved. We also had more people out there trying to get people to
Commons. That was something that really helped.”

The local media was well-represented, with camera crews from New
Channel 8 and NBC Connecticut along with coverage by the New Haven
Register. News Channel 8’s Anne Nyberg also shot some of her
own video footage for her “Annie Mame” blog.

Outside Commons, the Bulldogs did everything they could to thank
those who were waiting. Assistant football coach Doug Semones went
through the line distributing the pizza donated by Yorkside, and
sandwiches from the dining hall at Calhoun College --
Schwartz’ residential college – were available as well.
Ciotti added some cookies from Commons, and the Bulldogs also got
appearances from both mascots -- Handsome Dan, the live bulldog,
and Boola, the costumed bulldog -- to keep people entertained.

Meanwhile, inside Commons the Bulldogs also had to adjust to the
late rush. There were approximately 100 people processed in just
one 20-minute span shortly after 2 p.m. The football and
women’s ice hockey teams had gotten together weeks earlier to
pre-assemble hundreds of donor testing kits, but that supply
eventually ran out. The Yale volleyball coaching staff held down
the fort assembling additional kits with a handful of football and
hockey players as long as they could. When the call for
reinforcements went out, that group suddenly found itself with an
extra half-dozen members of the football team ready to step in and
learn on the fly about where to place the various identification
stickers on the paperwork and swabs. Within a matter of minutes,
the Bulldogs once again had enough kits ready to keep the line
flowing as smoothly as possible.

Players on each team were asked to donate an hour of their time
to help out on Thursday, but many went above and beyond. Junior
fullback Shane Bannon spent most of his day at Station 4, working
with senior defenseman Alyssa Clarke to make sure potential donors
had their paperwork filled out properly before directing them over
to the cheek-swabbing station. Bannon even got his father, who owns
County Line Auto in nearby Middlebury, involved -- Robert Bannon
ran public service announcements promoting the drive on all the
local radio stations where he advertises.

“I think if we can give back, we should,” Shane
Bannon said. “This was a pretty simple way to do that.
Hopefully we’ll get a few matches.”

That is exactly the type of community-oriented thinking that Tom
Williams, Yale’s Joel E. Smilow ’54 Head Coach of
Football, has preached to his team ever since arriving in New Haven
in 2009. It is no coincidence that the team has risen to the
occasion each time Williams issued a challenge to get as many
people registered as possible these past two years.

“Coach Williams inspires us to compete in everything
we do,” said Bannon. “If we’re going to do
something, we’re going to do it big.”

Yale women’s hockey head coach Hilary Witt and her
assistants were also key participants on Thursday. Assistant coach
Paul Nemetz-Carlson had been helping keep track of the total number
of registrants, and as the drive wound down it looked as if Yale
was going to fall just short of the 900 mark. But just as they did
last year to get past 700, the Bulldogs spread out throughout the
surrounding area to recruit one last group of donors from the few
students and dining hall workers still around long after lunchtime.
In the end, Nemetz-Carlson got the distinction of being the
900th registrant. Shortly after that, the Bulldogs ran
out of registration forms and stopped the drive at around 4 p.m.,
an hour after it was initially scheduled to end.

In the end, the Bulldogs succeeded through teamwork and
planning. With Schwartz as their inspiration, they tapped into a
community spirit that extended well beyond the Yale campus. The
ultimate goal is to find a match not just for Mandi, but for many
others like her.

“What was inspiring was this wasn’t just a
patient-focused drive, trying to find a match for one particular
person,” Mulcahy said. “This was people getting
together for a good cause.”